In one of my last posts I wrote about a young company Rarebyte. The folks from Rarebyte are mainly focused in game development but they also have a great experience in building highly scalable middleware applications for sport timing respectively sport events.

Rankz is desigend for small to very large sports events with thousands of athletes. Its purpose is to get detailed information about every aspect of a sport event in real time. It has already been successfully used at the

Rankz is also the central core layer in a student project called “IRONNET” (FH-Sportstiming) done by students from Network Engineering & Communication (NET) and is also the overall software basis used by “FH Sportstiming” (NET). An older version is also operated by Triangle Show & Sports Promotion Gmb.

The middleware uses spring core layer technologies which allows them to be highlight flexible. The data structures which specify the sport event can be entirely configured through XML. A full featured editor for XML/POJO is also available. The interface to the timing database can also be configured through XML. For this reason you are neither limited by the used format of the timing data nor to the database engine. Rankz works out of the box with MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MSSql.

Furthermore Rankz uses a dynamic plugin system. So new features can be added very easily. Plugins can be loaded and unloaded @ runtime.

Features

Superfast – detailed results nearly live during a race

Support for plugins (input, output, calculations)

Platform independent (completely written in Java)

Integrated webserver (Jetty)

Plugins:

Overall ranking

Ranking per split

Ranking in athlete’s age group

Relative ranking at certain splits

Timing, average Speed, finishing context,….

statistic system and missed time error correction system

FTP plugin upload

Athlete’s (geographical) real time position prediction.

SMS/MMS Notification Service

Athlete’s@Twitter …

Virtual Athlete’s rankings (audience favorite….)

Position estimation

RESTful resource connectors

Webservice Revision Layer

Distributed mode for sport events like wingsforlife

Query engine

RESTful interface

Web output for all plugins

CSV exports for all plugins

Android/iPhone (iOS) applications for live data/timing visualization (special version for Event Moderator/sport commentators).